Great Exhibitions #18: Carlijn Kingma — Fear of Falling @ Brutus, Rotterdam

Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 – 15:00
Meeting point: In front of Brutus, Rotterdam

Some exhibitions are beautiful.
Others are necessary.

For the 18th edition of Great Exhibitions, we will visit Fear of Falling, the powerful new exhibition by Carlijn Kingma at Brutus, Rotterdam — an immersive visual investigation into the financial, economic and political systems shaping contemporary society.

Through monumental, hyper-detailed black-and-white drawings, Kingma maps the invisible mechanisms behind housing crises, financial inequality, precarity and social stratification. Her work functions like a form of visual cartography, translating complex systems into dense, dystopian landscapes that feel at once surreal, Kafkaesque and disturbingly real.

At the centre of the exhibition stands an enormous drawing-machine depicting the housing system as a speculative market: those at the top — banks, real estate owners, financial institutions — thrive, while those below struggle, fall, and disappear into invisibility. Tents, faceless figures, counting devices, endless pipes, wheels and infrastructures form a world where fear of social descent becomes the engine of competition, isolation and anxiety.

Inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1989 book Fear of Falling, Kingma’s work reflects on the permanent insecurity of the middle class and on how financial systems erode solidarity, transforming housing, labour and even hope into speculative assets.

This is not just an exhibition — it is a visual essay on power, inequality and modern life, where art becomes a tool for understanding and questioning the structures that govern our everyday reality.

### After the exhibition

As always, we will continue the conversation over a drink — this time at Stadshaven Brouwerij, one of Rotterdam’s most exciting new breweries. Opened in 2022 as part of the post-industrial regeneration of the port area (which also hosts Brutus), Stadshaven offers a wide range of creative beers in a striking industrial setting, just a short walk from the exhibition.

Art. Systems. Society.
And a beer to reflect together.